Bayana

Bayana, a town in Rajasthan, is the subject of this study of its buildings and monuments, which questions the usual account of how Muslim architecture and city planning took shape in India. Around the close of the twelfth century, the first Muslim rulers seized a powerful Hindu stronghold and then founded a city on open land beneath it. Later they remodelled the fort and built a second town inside its walls. Through the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the two settlements formed the core of a self-governing territory.

Rather than limiting itself to the historical, architectural and archaeological evidence, the book asks a broader question: how far did Bayana's artistic traditions, which grew up separately from those of Delhi, shape later architecture in northern India? It argues that these traditions prepared the ground for the Mughal style, which borrowed many of its features from innovations first seen in Bayana.